As promised, it´s time to make an update on my work in the last few months.

The first half of 2012 surprised me in many ways, partly in a negative way, but that's not an issue meant for this blog, and partly in the positive. In a year where Portugal is immersed in financial crisis and instability at many levels, I ended up being caught offguard by the amount of jobs and opportunities that 2012 brought. From January until June, i hardly stopped to think or rest due to the succession of gigs, which was good to keep my head out of the negative part of the year. For the first time in years, I was "in the zone", without room to question about anything that I was laying down on paper, which sometimes could be a bad thing, but in this case was great, because it freed me from all the sel-doubting and second guessing which haunts my creative process from time to time.

At that time, I made some of the best work I remember doing, including some nice pieces for Brand New Nostalgia, a place which helped me a lot in keeping a pace and enthusiasm for drawing that are key to getting good results in this line of work.

Then we get to July and to time when something just switched off in this volatile circuit called inspiration and my brain started rejecting the act of drawing. Paid works started to be scarce and the space these creative dry spells require to develop started to grow and eventually inertia creeped in. Projects like the webcomic Hanuram and other ideas on my table started to get into these prolonged phases of "research and development", which is just another way of saying they were put torest until the ideas came out and I could force myself to sit my ass at the drawing table for a whole morning or an afternoon, a freaking half hour even, just to jot down everything on sketchbooks or comic pages. There was a time when the thought of not drawing another line ever again didn't really bothered me.

The thing is, I'm an illustrator, that's what I made myself into throughout my life, and an illustrator that only has drawing as a skill and doesn't want to or isn't able to do just that is pretty much useless. That inertia and the attempts to fight it became a sort of cycle which kept going for weeks, precisely until the end of August when three things in particular made me again face the drawing board, and my career, dead in the eyes.

One was the fact that Brand New Nostalgia was going into another stage in its development, with the project of its first collective book, KaBOOMbox, which forced me into a do or die moment in terms of affirming myself as a storyteller. An enterprise like this one, even in a group based on creative freedom and fun, acts as a statement, a will to show your own work without any compromise or previous approval from whomever. Even more, keeping the highest level possible in a group where no one wants to be the weakest link, besides being great creatively, gives you an accountability before fellow colleagues that clears out any existencial doubts you might tend to live with.

The second event was the invitation I got from André Oliveira to contribute two pages for the next Zona, dedicated to Drawing, an invitation which dropped like a bomb on a time of my life where drawing was not an activity I was comfortable with. To think about the theme "Drawing and Me" was the wost and best thing that I could have had to ponder at the time. Without spoiling what came out in the short I made, the theme forced me to think about what Drawing meant to my life and what had been my goal when I chose to drawing as a means of earning my living. Did I want to draw for a living again? Did the pleasure and calling compensate the allnighters, the on and off calls for work, the payments in 30, 60, 90 or more days, the ignorance and lack of respect common about my line of work? How would I put all of that in perspective at this time? Well, not without effort, I asked these and other questions to myself, drew the two pages to include on Zona Desenha that I am proud of and came out of the experience with a few answers which I'll keep to myself.

All it rests to say about it is that drawing and telling stories, as hard and painful as it is sometimes, are a part of me, and the negative sides to it come not from the act of drawing itself, but from what circles around it and the way I react to that.

The third motive which led me to confront the inertia also caught me by surprise in the middle of August. Out of the blue, I got a mail from a friend, Rui Veiga, with a 3D mock-up of the lead character on my webcomic Hanuram. The shock of having someone care enough about my work to the point of spending their time and talent to contribute with something like this was very helpful to break apart this nonsense of drawing blocks and doubts which only come in the way of the act of creating that should be the driving force behind everything I do in my work. Beyond that, that caring showed me that the way to build a career and a personal brand may have many other ways than I originally thought of. Well, that is material for future posts.

I have wasted a lot of years trying to adapt to specific markets and tastes and lost the notion that what I want to do may have to build its own way, a longer way, but a more honest way. I think I'm back to my old way of thinking. My stories, my worlds, my voice.

To summarize an already long speech, I had a little stroll through a desert in the last few months, kept dropping on tthe way what's not useful anymore and I'm now getting to a more fertile spot, where I can take up again some of the goals I set up at the beggining of the year. Hanuram is going forward in the next days. The first short to be made will feature in KaBOOMbox, and then the webcomic will have its start on its Tumblr home. There's a project to manage and execute right here in Portugal until the end of the year, a lot of ideas coming up in the meantime, and jobs that got sidetracked through my own fault and that I have to take care of to make up for these inner complications.